Finish your Compost with a Compost Sifter

Benefits of Adding a Compost Sifter to your Composting Toolbox

What is a compost sifter?

One of the greatest joys of composting is being able to use the mature compost you’ve created as a soil booster for indoor and outdoor plants. But sometimes finished compost doesn’t appear as aesthetically pleasing as we’d like. It can contain food scraps and other organic matter as well as inorganic material such as stones and bits of trash, making the texture uneven and difficult to work with. What you want is perfect mature compost made from original ingredients (kitchen scraps, leaves, twigs) that are no longer recognizable.

That’s where a compost sifter comes in handy. Without a compost sifter, getting your compost ready to, say, spread on your lawn in the fall, or mix in with your veggie garden soil, can be laborious when done by hand and without the right tools, but a sifter makes the job pretty simple.

Types of compost sifters

In the world of compost sifters, you can choose from low-tech screens that you hold over a wheelbarrow to hi-tech versions that spin and built on wheels. There are several questions to ask yourself when considering what to look for in a compost sifter:

How much compost will I be sifting?

How often will I need to sift my compost?

How fine do I want your compost to be?

What will the compost be used for?

Am I willing to do some manual labor to sift my compost?

Using the answers to these questions, you should be able to determine what style of compost sieve you require. There are dozens of plans for building your own compost sifter online, but here are a few to give you an idea of the possibilities :